


Tangling Webs

by slightly_ajar



Category: MacGyver (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Canon Divergent, Episode 301, Episode Tag, Episode: s03e01 Improvise, Fix It, Found Family, I've fixed it, Jill is fine, Jill is still alive, Team as Family, references to Zac Efron
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-28
Updated: 2018-11-28
Packaged: 2019-09-01 22:30:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16774195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slightly_ajar/pseuds/slightly_ajar
Summary: This is my fix it for what happened to Jill in Improvise, episode 301.  I wanted Jill to still be alive so I made something where she was.“…but she believed in truth just as strongly, hoped just as hard and loved just as fiercely.”





	Tangling Webs

**Author's Note:**

> I love Jill and I don't want her to be gone so I've written something that fixes the problem. This story has been pretty thoroughly Jossed now but I don't care, it's still my preferred version of events :).
> 
> A big thanks to today-i-try for the betaing. I am an compulsive tinkerer and I've changed quite a lot of things in this story since this was first looked over so any and all mistakes are absolutely my own.
> 
> If you would like to come and say hello on Tumblr I’m there as [Sky-larking](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/sky-larking)

The wreath on Jill’s coffin was made of daisies. 

Daisies were her favourite flower. They were bright and sunny. Like a spring day. Like her god daughter’s smile. 

She hadn’t wanted lilies at her funeral. Their thick pollen made her sneeze and their heavy heads were so dreary and _funereal_. Why have a miserable looking flower at a ceremony that was supposed to be a celebration of someone’s life? She had wanted bright colours at hers. For her loved ones to tell funny stories about her. For there to be memories and laughter and people singing along with her favourite songs. 

Jill shifted the flowers in her hands to push her dark glasses up. The congregation were too far away to recognise her if they glanced in her direction but she wanted to be careful. To be sure. She was doing all this to protect them. 

The minister was speaking at her graveside but the warm breeze drifting through the cemetery carried his words away from her as if they were the ashes and dust he was speaking of. 

“A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing.” She imagined him saying. “A time to get, and a time to lose.”

The breeze swelled into a swift gust of wind that rushed through the grounds, pulling at the hat Jill’s hair was tucked inside and picking up some flowers from her graveside, spinning them upwards then sending them dancing away and out of sight. Jill wondered if they’d play Breaking Free from High School Musical during her funeral service as she watched the tulips disappear. She still loved that song even though she’d (mostly) come out of the other side of her Zac Efron phase. 

She’d been obsessed with High School Musical when she was younger. Gabriella was unapologetically smart and refused to compromise to be like the popular girls, and Troy loved her because of it. It had given hope to the little girl with the big glasses who chose science class over hanging out under the bleachers and restyling her hair. If the kids at East High could build a community together where they accepted each other for who they were then she could find that too. 

She’d announced to her mom and dad that she what she wanted Breaking Free played at her funeral while packing her Troy and Gabriella lunchbox one morning back then, apropos of nothing. The song had an important message and it meant a lot to her, she’d said, tilting her chin up, full of the earnest resolve of a pre-teen. Jill knew that some people cringed when they looked back at themselves at that age but she never felt much shame when she thought of her younger self. She didn’t think she’d changed that much, apart from she’d grown out her terrible bangs and started feeling differently about Han Solo after she became an adult. (She still thought Luke Skywalker was cute but after puberty she’d realised that Han Solo was, well, he was a young Harrison Ford…) She was wiser and taller, she didn’t have rainbows on her bedroom wallpaper or write in her journal with a Beauty and the Beast pencil anymore, but she believed in truth just as strongly, hoped just as hard and loved just as fiercely. 

Her parents had shared an amused look at her speech, then they carefully arranged their smiles into expressions of understanding and promised her they’d to try to remember that. 

Her parents. 

She wasn’t close enough to make out their faces but she could see them at the graveside, slumping under the burden of their grief. They were leaning together, both of them relying on the strength of the other to hold them up. Their posture was one of united sorrow and fragility, a careful balance in which her mom and dad were being sustained by the support they were giving each other. A balance that could easily be shaken and if tipped would cause them both to crumble. 

Seeing them, watching their pain, tore at Jill with sharp talons of guilt and sorrow that ached beneath her ribs. She looked away. 

Her Phoenix family was beside her parents, dressed in black and silent and sombre in a way she’d never seen before. Matty was next to her mom, her chin up and her jaw fixed in stoic endurance. Leanna and Bozer were behind her, arm in arm. Bozer’s head was down and Leanna shifted towards him to whisper into his ear. 

Riley and Jack stood alongside them, Riley tucked into Jack’s side, so close that Jill couldn’t see the outline of their individual silhouettes. Jill watched as Riley looked over her shoulder to where Mac was standing at the edge of the group slightly apart from the others. His back was as straight as if he was stood at attention and his gaze was fixed on the flowers sitting on top of the coffin. 

The last thing Jill remembered before the crash was shouting Mac’s name. Murdoc had lunged for her, she’d screamed and there had been fear, pain, blood then blackness. Mac must have heard the horror in her voice and had to think that he’d witnessed her terrified final moments. 

Riley reached out and took Mac’s hand. He looked down at their joined fingers then up at Riley, tipping his head to the side. He lifted their hands in recognition and thanks and stepped closer to Riley, uniting with the tight knot of his friends. As he moved Jack looked over to him and nodded. 

Jill had opened her eyes to a white, fuzzy world when she’d woken in hospital. Her mouth had been dry and her throat rough. When she’d tried to shift in her bed her limbs had been heavy with the effects of the medication the needle in the back of her hand was dripping into her veins. 

“It’s nice to see you awake, Ms Morgan.” 

Oversight had been sat next to her bed. She squinted at him and saw that he was holding out something she recognised as her glasses. 

Jill had studied James MacGyver for likenesses to Mac ever since she’d met him and learned he was Mac’s father. She hadn’t been able to find much of a resemblance between the two men other than Oversight had the same quick, genius level intellect as his son. Mac was warm and friendly whereas his father had an aura of aloofness surrounding him that made her feel like she was being judged whenever she spoke to him. 

Jill had pushed her glasses on and relaxed with relief as her surroundings had slipped into focus. She looked up at Oversight and he smiled at her. A genuine smile, not a bland accompaniment to a polite greeting or an uptick of his lips caused by wry amusement, and Jill could see echoes of Mac in the expression. 

“Miss Morgan,” his lips quirked up again, “Jill, I have something difficult to ask of you.” 

No one could know she survived the crash. Not her parents, her friends or the family she and her Phoenix colleagues had created for themselves. If everyone she cared about thought she was gone then Murdoc would too. She would become just another victim to him, just another body he had left behind, he would forget about her. 

He would never expect her. 

So now she was stood in new shoes with coloured hair and name that had been given to her in a confidential dossier watching herself being laid to rest. She could feel the mid-morning sun on her skin, smell glass and freshly turned earth and see all the people she loved grieving for her. 

If she started to run. Now. Right now. She could run to her family, hold her mother and everything would be alright. Her mom would stop crying. The empty, devastated shadow would vanish from her dad’s eyes. She could go back to work at the Phoenix and help people from the safety of her lab. She could be cheerful, friendly, geeky Jill again. 

But. 

But if she did that. If she ran to her family and confessed everything the advantage she had over Murdoc would be lost. Months of work, tracking him, learning his methods, would be for nothing. She had a chance, a real chance, of stopping Murdoc and she had to take it. 

She turned away. There was one more thing she wanted to do before she left Jill Morgan behind until her mission was complete. She headed through the cemetery and paused when she reached the gravestone she had been searching for, smiling at the name etched into the headstone. 

Jack S Dalton Snr. 

The scientist in her didn’t believe in rituals or omens or blessings. Gut feelings were just the unconscious mind making decisions based on tiny cues the conscious mind didn’t acknowledge. Good luck was just supposed patterns in random acts of chance. Jill knew it wasn’t rational but before she started the assignment that was to be her sole focus for as long as it took to bring Murdoc down she wanted to ask for help and protection, and for forgiveness for the lies she had allowed to be told. 

She couldn’t request absolution from the people she had wronged but she could ask for redemption from someone significant. Someone influential. 

Jack talked about his dad so much, he was such an important person in his life, Jill felt that if she had his blessing it would be like he was looking out for her. Like she still had a connection to her Phoenix friends. 

She stepped forward and reverently laid the purple hyacinths in her hand onto the grave. 

“Please let them know that I’m sorry and I’ll see them as soon as I can.” 

Jill turned, heading towards her mission. She’d lied and hurt people to undertake it but she believed it would be worthwhile. When it was complete the people she cared about – and all the others who were due to find themselves in Murdoc’s sights – would be safe. 

She believed that. She had to believe that. 

Jill walked away, her heels clicking on the sidewalk as she went, the swift _click-clack_ beating out the start of the new rhythm to her life. 

**Author's Note:**

> In the language of flowers, which the internet tells me is called floriography, purple hyacinths mean: I am sorry, please forgive me.
> 
> I can't be the only one who didn't think of Han Solo as being that good looking when they were little but started to appreciate him more and more as they grew up. The older I get the more attractive looking Harrison Ford is starting to look. Have you seen him in Raiders of the Lost Ark? 
> 
> The title comes from the quote "O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive" - Walter Scott


End file.
